‘The Polar Circle’ published in Sweden
Liza Marklund radically reinvented the crime fiction genre in the late 90s with her legendary The Bomber, featuring crime reporter Annika Bengtzon. With her brand new novel The Polar Circle, a psychological thriller in the darkly humorous vein of Big Little Lies, she is once again breaking new ground in the genre.
Lolita. Roots. The Thorn Birds. Cop Killer. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It’s an eclectic mix of titles that reflects five distinct personalities on the cusp of adulthood, womanhood, and a permanent, deadly change. Welcome to the book club THE POLAR CIRCLE.
Travel north, to the quiet village of Stenträsk, where a crumbling bridge reveals its secret for the first time in forty years. A young woman’s headless body, preserved since the summer of 1980. What happened that August when one of the girls went missing, and how did it change the members of the book club The Polar Circle? What were their secrets, and which ones will come to light now?
The Polar Circle is the first installment in Liza Marklund’s Polar Circle Trilogy, and a riveting deep dive into the minds of five women – as they were then, girls about to graduate high school, and as they are now: mothers, widowed, closeted, ambitious, overlooked. Sex, jealousy, and the drive to escape one’s small-town roots had already predetermined the end of their girlhood alliance-slash-friendship. But what was it that demanded the life of one of them before they parted?
This is a thriller from the deepest north of Sweden, where Liza herself spent her formative teenage years in the ‘80s, just like the girls in the novel. Revisiting that time and place in The Polar Circle makes this remarkable and deeply personal novel dense with authenticity and presence.